Human pharmacological MRI

During the past 5 years, functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used increasingly to map the modulatory effects of psychopharmacological agents on cognitive activation of large-scale networks in the human brain. Such pharmacological MRI (phMRI) studies can be informative about pharmacodynamics, specific neurotransmitter mechanisms that underlie the adaptivity of neurocognitive systems to variation in task difficulty and familiarity, and changes in neurophysiological drug effects associated with genetic variation, neuropsychiatric disorders and normal aging. In this article, we review >50 relevant published articles from this rapidly growing literature and highlight some emerging themes, including: the importance of individual differences in genotype and cognitive phenotype as conditioners of drug effects on brain activation; the formulation of inverted-U models to describe similar effects of agonist and antagonist drugs acting on the same receptors; and the potential utility of this technique for testing transmitter models of disorders, predicting treatment response, and supporting the development of novel compounds in neuropsychiatry.